Saturday, September 26, 2009

Homemade Char Siew

This weekend's fun project was making char siew for the first time. Turns out it's a lot easier than I thought - just marinate and roast. The best thing is, you can omit the red food colouring. I adapted the ieat Fatty Cheong recipe (see below).

The char siew turned out not bad, but still missing a certain something. It is a bit too salty (I started marinating a day before roasting). But at least it's not cloyingly sweet. The surprise ingredient here was taucheo (bean paste) - I never knew char siew involved this. I'm not crazy about taucheo so I reduced the proportion used but the flavour came out quite strongly still.

These are the measurements I used. By the way, this makes A LOT OF MARINADE. You can easily soak 1kg pork in this.

INSTRUCTIONS 1. Mix all the ingredients together and marinade the meat in it for at least an hour (overnight is best).

2. Roast in a moderately hot oven for half an hour, turning and basting the meat till it is cooked and slightly charred.

I roasted it in my tabletop oven, 200 degrees C for half an hour (basting halfway and at the end), and then at 240 degrees for another 10 minutes for greater char.

Oh yes, my favourite parts are the charred bits.

Well, now I can say I have made both char siew and roast pork. Still prefer the latter over char siew though.

Oh the other thing to note is that the pork shrinks a bit after roasting. I thought I might have leftovers to make char siew pao but it was all gone in one meal.

Addendum: Was talking to Tiantianchi on Facebook and he suggested adding a pinch of five-spice powder and even using rose dew wine 玫瑰露 instead of rice wine. Fantastic ideas! I'm also thinking of experimenting with miso honey combinations rather than taucheo.

Julia: Yeah, I should have made more, but I wasn't sure I could pull it off. So try a little bit first!

Eggtoast: hah, to me, it's still not charred enough! MORE CHAR PLEASE! And I guess you haven't seen my siew yoke. I made that first a long time ago, am not a fan of char siew actually. I put the roast pork link above too.

I was interested to read your recipe. I make char siu regularly, it's one of my favourites. Surprisingly, your recipe is totally different to mine but yours looks delicious nonetheless. If you want to try a different version, check out my recipe. It's listed under labels of Pork & Chinese.

In my experience, if you know what you're doing, home cooked roasted meats are far superior than a restaurant/hawker stand. Here are a couple of tips to consider:

1) To ensure the char siew is not too salty, carefully measure the Oyster sauce, soy(a) sauce and bean paste. These three ingredients have lots of sodium, particularly the bean paste. I would recommend reducing the soy/a and oyster sauces by 2/3, and only use 1/4 of the bean paste...you want the flavors, not the sodium. I like to use low salt Kikoman (green label) soy sauce.

2) I agree with the recommendation to add five spice powder...this ingredient really enhances and complements the marinade and natural pork flavors. Plus you get the added benefit of enfusing the kitchen and entire home with the fragrant five spice aroma while the char siew is roasting. In the marinade, I also like to add 1/2 tsp of ground white pepper, and if I can find it, dry garlic powder and onion powder (for some reason, the markets in SG don't sell this...).

3) To minimize clean up, before putting the marinaded pork into the roasting pan, line the pan with aluminum foil. Just be careful when you baste the pork so that you don't puncture the foil...if you are roasting lots of pork, I recommend putting down an extra layer of foil, just in case. There's nothing worse than soaking and scrubbing a roasting pan after a delicious meal (and a few glasses of beer and/or wine).

Yes, anonymous, I did think it was a lot of oyster sauce, soy sauce and salty bean paste. But since this was my first attempt, I didn't veer too far from the original recipe and only reduced bean paste. Now I know better.

Five spice powder definitely! Also agree on placing foil or parchment in the pan. Not a fan of strenuous scrubbing!

Does anyone know where I can find roast suckling pig in Singapore? I am not looking to buy an entire roast pig, but rather a decent portion with the thin, crispy skin served over steamed rice. Please advise. Thanks.

Yes indeed, cooking is about works-in-progress. Thanks for the tip on the herbal mutton soup stall :) The stall I was referring to had an herbal broth as well as a creamy stew. With rice either one was a super meal. I should try to recreate it, because it would sure be the rage in Chicago or Singapore.